The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Michael Shermer likes to tread dangerous waters. His latest dip into challenging the received turbulance of our times is an evolutionary explanation for the state of Modern Capitalism. Politicos, religionists and the lay masses, if they actually take a gander through Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, will likely recoil in disagreement. “You mean to say democratic life is not God-ordained?” they may gasp.

Shermer, chief evolutionist and resident skeptic at Skeptic Magazine, has long maintained the root of human behavior lies not only in our biology but in how our surroundings influence our actions. In this latest iteration, Shermer traces human evolution to explain why we are the way we are today. “If our species is about a hundred thousand years old, then 90 percent of our history has been spent in (a) state of relative economic simplicity,” he writes.

It’s true. The 1997 anthropological manifesto Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environmentdescribes in various essays how our hunter-gatherer ancestry got along in sustainable bands and tribes. Shermer, similar to these others before him, then extrapolates the “relative state of economic simplicity” into what we are today: consumer traders. (more…)

Do liberals and conservatives spindoctor science, or are renegade journalists high on anthropomorphism? Franz de Waal, who’s a scientist, a primatologist to be exact, weighs in on the primate revisionism that occurs in this month’s issue of The New Yorker. De Waal explains:

“The main message of (Ian) Parker’s piece could of course have been that fieldwork is no picnic, but instead he went for profound revelation: bonobos are not nearly as nice and sexual as they have been made out to be. Given that the bonobo’s reputation has been a thorn in the side of homophobes as well as Hobbesians, the right-wing media jumped with delight. The bonobo ‘myth’ could finally be put to rest. Parker’s piece was gleefully picked up by The Wall Street Journal and Dinesh D’Souza (yes, the same one who blamed 9/11 on the left), who accused ‘liberals’ of having fashioned the bonobo into their mascot. D’Souza urged them to stick with the donkey.”

At the end of the day, this issue is essentially about the common discomfort–on both sides of the political spectrum–with comparing humans to primates. It’s the worst kind of human exceptionalism because it ignores one simple point: We are primates. One kind of many.

Of course, it’s not just journalists who have trouble with science. So do scientists. (more…)

Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule has gained a lot of traction lately no doubt for two main reasons: the stickiness of the title and the fact that most can probably relate to book’s subject—assholes in the workplace. Most attractive for readers is that Sutton bases his views on academic research, particularly from the fields of social psychology (Bob Cialdini), organizational psychology and primate studies by Robert Sapolsky. Sapolski, Sutton tells us, noticed how monkeys over generations became nicer after old-guard monkeys—assholes in question—were wiped out by eating diseased meat from a garbage dump. Their greed did them in, and the less aggressive—those who were denied choice morsals from the dump by their asshole kin—survived, ulitmately changing the monkey culture to shun asshole behavior. (Reminds me of our own asshole ancestors.) Worthy adjuncts to Sutton’s book are a couple of my favorites: Franz de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics and Peacemaking Among Primates.

Implications for public relations are numerous in Sutton’s book, particularly for internal communications, understanding organizational culture and overall organizational success and functioning.